Saturday, August 29, 2015

When Donald Trump announced his 2016 presidential bid, Rand Paul was a serious Republican contender, enjoying over 8% of the support among primary voters, placing him somewhere between third and fifth in a field of fifteen.

Among GOP contenders, Trump's unapologetic political incorrectness contrasted most glaringly with Rand Paul's big tent ethnomasochism. It spilled out in the Fox News debate, as Rand Paul was the only candidate to really go for Trump's jugular (the rest of the field was content to let Fox do it for them). Trump humiliated Paul for his trouble.

Okay, you got me.

So it's instructive--and encouraging--to see that just as Trump swatted Paul down in the debate, Trump's ascendancy has been coupled with Paul's descent into irrelevance. Paul is now bumping along the seabed at 2%-3% support even though he has been campaigning for the presidency since the day after the 2012 elections:

The data are taken from Politico's moving average so that graph is a lagging indicator by several days. The latest Quinnipiac poll had Paul at 2%. He's toast.

When I mentioned this on one of Jack Hunter's facebook posts that consisted of complaining about racist support for Trump, he deleted the comment and unfriended me. Jack used to be a fairly prominent member of the dissident right and my relationship with him was a holdover from that time. I had been happy to engage with him and try to provide intellectual counsel to him where I could until his pathetic about face a couple of years ago in 2013 after it was 'publicly' revealed that he had written the unthinkable, including "Americans aren't wrong to deplore the millions of Hispanics coming here" because "a non-white majority America would simply cease to be America" and sympathizing with John Wilkes Booth. Inexcusable!

Prostrating himself in front of the Establishment he had rapidly began fancying himself a part of, his mea culpa included this gem: "I'm not a racist, I just played one on the radio".

Like Paul, Jack embodies the opposite of everything that makes the Trump phenomenon so captivating. Guys like John Derbyshire and Peter Brimelow have paid heavy prices for their intellectual and moral fortitude, a price far too high for a guy like Jack to endure.

Trump's continued success, coupled with a recent Rasmussen poll showing that 71% of the public thinks that "political correctness is a problem in America today"--and while the cross tabs are pay gated, presumably that figure is even higher among non-Hispanic whites--provides some justification in being cautiously optimistic that things have reached a breaking point and that a real, widespread push back against cultural Marxism is occurring.

Citizens of the world like to point out, with heads shaking, the public's ignorance of what percentage of the federal budget goes to foreign aid. Kaiser found a mean estimate of 26%. The actual figure is about 1% (curiously, this reaction is not elicited when it comes to overestimates in the populations of blacks, Jews, gays, or Hispanics). In 2012, that 1% came to about $48.5 billion.

Here's a modest populist proposal for the Trump campaign--or for one of the other GOP wet noodles who want to show they are still alive and kicking. Scrap foreign aid. All of it. Divert that spending to the barrier. That annual outlay of $48.5 billion comes to $24.8 million per mile, or $4,700 per foot. And it would be recurring. Think $25 million a year is enough to maintain a single mile of wall? The US wouldn't have to outsource the work to Mexico with that kind of funding. I bet Trump could get it done ahead of schedule and under budget.

Instead of giving money to other sovereign nations, spend it on securing our own sovereignty instead. I'd vote for that.

Saturday, August 22, 2015

See right at 13 minutes in (the ad wall keeps me from sharing at exactly that point):

A little HBD realism in a successful businessman is hardly surprising. Hell, it's probably a prerequisite. But the refusal to treat acknowledging as much as the worst thing in the world is, like just about everything else with Trump's campaign, a breath of fresh air.

I suspect we won't get the disastrous educational romanticism of No Child Left Behind with a Trump presidency, anyway.

Friday, August 21, 2015

See Ed West (via the chickadee), on the English not being a very family-oriented people in contrast with Middle Easterners and North Africans on the family-oriented other end of the spectrum and Mediterranean peoples somewhere in between. He subsequently considers the advantages societies with weak family connections enjoy. I'm not sure from the excerpt if he discusses the disadvantages such societies face, like pathological altruism and low fertility rates.

Turns out the GSS has a potentially relevant question from 2002 in which respondents were asked how often they'd been in contact with a cousin in the past four weeks.

Excluding those who did not have any living cousins, I created a simple index of extended family closeness (EFC), by self-reported ethnicity, by giving 2 points for the percentages of respondents who had been in contact with a cousin more than twice in over the last four weeks, 1 point for the percentages who had been in contact once or twice over the same period of time, and no points for the percentages who had no contact with a cousin. Thus the higher the score, the closer the extended family (clannish) ties tend to be. Because the question was only asked in a single iteration of the survey, sample sizes by ethnicity are pretty small. Only responses for ethnicities with at least 25 respondents are included here. The data are suggestive, not statistically significant, so make of them what you will:

Ethnicity

EFC

African

117.1

American Indian

94.9

"American" only

88.8

Mexican

79.0

Italian

62.4

Irish

58.8

English/Welsh

58.7

German

56.5

French

48.2

Scottish

37.4

Given the small sample sizes and inherent imprecision of self-described ethnicity, these results pass the smell test. Excepting those of Scottish descent--maybe these are all low-landers!--the rank ordering is pretty close to what I would've expected it to be. Additionally, I'd have guessed the English/Welsh and French rankings would be flipped and that "Americans" would have come in between Italians and Irish. Many of those who self-identify as "American" are what we might also refer to as "Scotch-Irish" [edit: Only 39% are white while 52% are black and 3% are Hispanic, so the black element is far more explanatory than the potential Scotch-Irish element here, thanks M], so if we plug them roughly into the Irish and Scottish figures, the table has even more stereotypical validity.

Sunday, August 16, 2015

Trump laughs at your four television networks! And unlike Tom Tancredo back in 2008, he is dominating in the polls, with the most recent showing him at 25% with the next closest in the Republican field at 12%*. His campaign's official platform position on immigration is here. This is a leading presidential contender putting his name behind these things. I have vanishingly little hope in the political process, but the Trump phenomenon is something to behold. If your sentiments are similar to mine, you have to talk this guy up wherever you're able to.

Operation Wetback, carried out during the Eisenhower administration, showed that this isn't actually necessary. The threat of deportation will cause far more illegal immigrants to voluntarily self-deport than will ever actually need to be forcibly removed.

That said, this declaration is great. Carrying it out would do far, far more for American workers than any amount of minimum wage hiking ever will. It's basic supply and demand.

It's also the executive enforcing the people's laws which is, you know, the whole purpose of the executive branch of the federal government in the first place.

A few thoughts that are old hat to me but possibly novel to those who haven't been intellectually invested in the immigration debate over the last decade (or longer):

"Crops are rotting in the fields!"

Every year these ridiculous stories about 'crops rotting in the fields' crop (heh) up. It's called spoilage. It happens in virtually every industry. It's the marginal stuff that remains unpicked after the (almost literal) low-hanging fruit has been taken. It is not profitable to collect at even minimum wage, which is why it goes unpicked by agricultural laborers who are often paid by what they bring in.

The arguments that are made in favor of minimizing wages are the same arguments that can be made in favor of slavery. Without the modern welfare state, voluntary slavery would exist (in the Occident--it still exists in much of the non-Western world). Just came across a story from Rome in the early imperial period where a slave that was manumitted returned to his master a couple of weeks later pleading desperately to be returned to slavery because he had been reduced to emaciation and sleeping in public--at least slaves were fed, clothed, and given shelter. The only real difference between low wage agricultural work and slave agricultural work is that in the former the workers are paid subsistence wages while in the latter they are simply paid subsistence.

No country characterized by low labor costs is also a country with high median wages. It doesn't happen because wealth is not created by having humans perform menial tasks for minimal compensation but instead by mechanizing those menial tasks so that humans can do other things. There are lots of stories about how agricultural firms are investing in mechanized substitutes for labor they don't want to pay for. Necessity is the mother of invention and innovation. The US can either chase cheap labor like ancient Egypt, Persia, or Rome or it can industrialize and mechanize like England in the industrial revolution.

Those are not states characterized by high levels of immigration. To the contrary, every one of those states except for Hawaii (and Hawaii's immigrants are emphatically not the same immigrants that are inundating the contiguous 48 states from south of the border) has immigrant population percentages below the national average.

It's almost as if third-world peasants aren't there to do entry level jobs at sub-poverty wage rates (that are then heavily subsidized by those of us who are net taxpayers), Americans will do the jobs Americans won't do! Who mows the lawns, washes the dishes, and builds the houses in Montana? Must be Canadian immigrants!

These states also all have relatively high monetary standards of living, low crime, relative income equality, etc.

Mexico plays us like a fiddle. They export the bottom of their society that can't make it in Mexico and in return they get tens of billions of dollars in remittances each year. Export your poverty, your criminals, and your underachievers; get boatloads of cash in return. What's not to love? What's not to love if you're Mexico, that is.

The benefit to the US is a lot harder to determine because there isn't one unless you're an employer reaping the profits of cheap labor while throwing all the costs associated with that cheap labor onto taxpayers. Privatize profits, socialize costs--it's the new motto of corporate America.

* I don't think he's going to win the GOP nomination. If he manages to stand against the entire Establishment (really, all the opinion-making organs of society are against him--both political parties, the major media, big business) through multiple debates where traps will continue to be set exclusively for him, what will likely end up happening is that as the other ~16 GOP contenders drop out of the race one by one, they'll all start throwing their support behind one of the non-Trump candidates still in, so that it'll eventually just be Trump vs top Establishment candidate and most of the ~75% of Republican voters who are spread out across non-Trump candidates right now will come together against him.

I'm hopeful that he'll make a third party bid. The Republican party, like the Conservative party in Britain, is incapable of doing what needs to be done to maintain Anglo-Saxon civilization. Trump just might be able to give birth to something akin to Britain's UKIP in the US. If he does run third party, he won't win, but he likely would get the 5% required for said third party to be able to tap over $90 million in federal campaign funding in 2020, which is a prerequisite for any chance of a serious third party coming into being down the road. That is my hopeful outcome for the 2016 election.

Saturday, August 15, 2015

From a recent Pew report entitled Across Racial Lines, More Say Nation Needs to Make Changes to Achieve Racial Equality, the percentage of Americans who feel more needs to be done to give blacks equal rights has gently increased over the course of the Obama presidency, and has abruptly spiked above and beyond that trend over the last year. In 2009, 43% said "our country needs to continue making changes to give blacks equal rights with whites". In 2011, the figure was 45%. It was 46% in 2014, and jumped to 59% in 2015 (because Dylann Roof and BlackLivesMatter, I guess).

What particular rights enjoyed by whites but denied to blacks isn't specified, of course, because outcomes rather than processes are what is really at issue here. When the premise is that there are no innate differences between groups of people, it becomes almost unavoidable to conclude that because outcomes are unequal, the processes must be unequal (though not innately so!). That this premise is self-evidently false is not of specific interest here, however.

Instead, a subtle but recurring sentiment in the data caught my eye. The Racism Narrative's grip on the minds younger people appears to be less firm than it is on their parents' and even grandparents' generations. This especially seems to be the case when we consider that whites are more skeptical of the Racism Narrative than non-whites are and that younger generations are less white than older generations, and also that younger people tend to become more politically and culturally conservative as they get older.

Pew asked respondents about how big a problem racism is in society today. The following table shows a simple index where 3 points are given for a "big problem" response, 1 point for a "somewhat" response, -1 point for a "small" response, and -3 points for "not a problem" response. Thus the higher the score, the larger the perceived societal problem of racism is. By age, the results shake out as follows:

Age

Racism

18-29

158

30-44

161

45-64

164

65+

157

The differences are modestl and the overwhelming majority of survey participants think it's either a "big" problem or "somewhat [of a]" problem. There's also the added difficulty of accurately interpreting the results since racism in this context putatively refers to white racism directed towards non-whites (and specifically blacks) even though it's not actually specified as such. Dissidents and apostates might interpret the question to be inquiring about the existence of any sort of racial animus, not just that of whites directed at non-whites, and consequently say that racism is a societal problem even if they don't think white racism towards non-whites is part of that problem.

Still, white guilt may have hit its high-water mark with the baby boomers. They were the last white American generation that could afford to indulge themselves in it. As the consequences of diversity continue to take their tolls on economic health, social cohesion, and (legitimate) equal protection under the law in the US, necessity will give fewer and fewer whites any time for it.

While 18-29 year-olds were more likely to have express having a "negative" reaction (30%) to seeing the Confederate flag than the 45-64 (26%) and 65+ (22%) age groups were (30-44 was the most negative, at 31%), they were noticeably less enthusiastic about South Carolina removing the flag from the statehouse grounds than their older cohorts. The percentages of respondents, by age, who called it the "wrong" decision:

Coming of age in a society where everyone else has socially-sanctioned racial and ethnic interests of their own, it's not surprising that those of European descent, too, are increasingly coming to see themselves as whites rather than merely as non-non-whites.

Friday, August 14, 2015

Sanders: "Well, I think it's unfortunate because among other things I wanted to talk about the issue of black lives."

Video of the pusillanimous reaction of an aspiring 'leader of the free world':

Reiterating, SWPLs are incapable of criticizing any part of the 'mosaic' of variegated sacred objects that make up the Fringe Coalition. Sanders--aspiring leader of the free world, remember--while only ambiguously hinting that their outrageous behavior is counterproductive, is more importantly conceding that when it comes to taking control of a situation like that, his hands are tied because, after all, the protesters are black, there's nothing--NOTHING!--that can possibly be done!

The Democratic party is on the precipice of reaching majority-minority status. A pasty old enfeebled dinosaur like Sanders is a human doormat. It's a shame that someone who seems to intuitively grasp that a redistributive state needs to look like Vermont rather than California or Illinois to be viable has revealed himself to be the shambling embodiment of personified white capitulation for the 2016 presidential election.

- The SWPL inability to directly confront anything other than the wrong kind of white person (ie, heterosexual, nuclear family-oriented, traditionalist). The hapless man in the hat, the one with a total testosterone level south of 250, verbally contests being strong-armed by a couple of fat black women for less than a minute before yielding entirely to their outrageous demands to screech.

- Speaking of supine SWPLs, the quaint Bernie Sanders is exhibit A. He showed himself to be utterly incapable of dealing with a chaotic situation as it arose in front of him, a situation that was begging for someone with an ounce of leadership to get a handle on. After a few minutes of embarrassing impotence, he slinks away pathetically.

The way Sanders conducted himself helps explain why Donald Trump is currently on fire. It's impossible to imagine Trump taking this kind of shit lying down. "Has anyone seen this woman's EBT card? She lost it and now she's grouchy because her six kids want junk food. Can we get security up here to arrest her? Her oldest child is seven, and he's at home alone in charge of his five siblings." Trump's struck a nerve because he refuses to prostrate himself on the pyre in front of these demons of degeneracy. He prefers to give them the finger instead.

Parenthetically, I'd guess that in a similar situation all the other GOP contenders would've yielded to their sacred interlopers in a fashion similar to Sanders'.

- In a disunited, disintegrating America, good faith and fair play are losing tactics. When the other GOP marionettes, bought and sold by cheap labor lobbies and threatened by race hustling shakedown artists, demure to the Establishment, they get trounced for their troubles. As this video shows, when SWPLs demure to NAMs, they too get trounced. When someone who is expected to demure spits in the eye of his putative puppet master, the size of the viewing audience trebles as he starts kicking the asses of people who have been playing this nauseating game for their entire lives!

- The Old Left's brand of soft socialism could've worked in the America of a couple generations ago, but the demographic ship has since sailed. The country is now far too diverse, too geriatric, and too barren for it to function. NAMs like these nags in Seattle don't have time for lofty rhetoric about shared burdens and the equitable public redistribution from a collective pool of prosperity. What they want is stuff taken from whites and given to them. And they want whites to be, act, and feel humiliated in the process.

Sanders is a Democratic dinosaur. It is probable that in one of the next few presidential election cycles, a "historic moment" will occur when, for the first time, the Democratic contender wins the presidency while garnering less than half of his votes from non-Hispanic whites. The following graph shows the share of Democratic votes received by voter's race in 2012:

- Blacks have valid reasons to bellyache about their dispossession in progressive cities like Seattle that are pursuing strategies whose consequences naturally force them out of town (see the video 1:20 in). Raising minimum wage rates renders large numbers of blacks unemployable. Small coincidence that liberal cities like Seattle, San Francisco, Portland, New York, and DC have become less and less black as they've become more and more progressive.

The bullshit about diversity being strength isn't borne out by the behaviors of SWPLs who sing public paeans to it. There are lots of centralized, vibrant places where a white person can get lots of bang for his housing buck, but instead these good white folks spend five times as much per square foot to make sure they're surrounded by other SWPLs in neighborhoods as white as a klansman's utopia. We good liberals will talk about what a blessing diversity is, but you bigots in the suburbs are the ones who get to experience that blessing firsthand!

- Republican Hispandering and whatever Rand Paul's grotesque ethnomasochistic displays are called are electoral losers. It turns Core Americans off without picking up many Fringe votes.

If a way to make Hispanics and Asians hesitate to support the Democratic party exists, though, it was on full display in Seattle. Instead of condemning the interruptions, slick GOP pols should somberly nod and agree that these black bullies have valid grievances and should have a strong voice in a major US political party after suffering for so long. Just as the Republican party is considered the de facto white party on account of winning 60%-40% among whites, Republicans should insinuate that the Democratic party is the de facto black party. After all, it wins the black vote 95%-5%. So shop-owning Koreans in LA and Hispanics with kids attending Rosa Parks High School, how about the Black party?

Saturday, August 08, 2015

The University of Kansas is the largest public university in the state. It's on the national radar for medical research and a basketball team, and the putative education it provides to almost 30,000 students is probably noteworthy.

Bernadette Gray-Little does not appear to consider any of these things worthy of perpetual repetition in her capacity as chancellor, though. Here is the e-mail signature of the current chancellor of KU (verified from multiple sources over a period of time):

Sincerely,

Bernadette Gray-Little
Chancellor

The University of Kansas prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, ethnicity, religion, sex, national origin, age, ancestry, disability, status as a veteran, sexual orientation, marital status, parental status, gender identity, gender expression, and genetic information in the university's programs and activities. The following person has been designated to handle inquiries regarding the non-discrimination policies: Director of the Office of Institutional Opportunity and Access, ioa@ku.edu, 1246 West Campus Road, Room 153A, Lawrence, KS 66045, 785-864-6414, TTY 711.

My interaction with officious academia has been minimal over the last several years so for all I know this has become standard practice or maybe something that has become legally mandated in some capacity. Even if it's not (yet), it will be.

Parenthetically, it's good to see that we're no longer lumping people who suffer oppression due to gender identity with those who are oppressed on account of gender expression. It's about damned time!

Tuesday, August 04, 2015

Why such a visceral, vitriolic response to the sport killing of "Cecil the lion"?

Hunting is an activity almost exclusively engaged in by the wrong kind of white people. It consequently provides an ideal opportunity to open the floodgates of disdain to allow contempt to flow without inhibition.

Many other SWPL positions indicative of putative moral superiority over the wrong kind of whites quite inconveniently insinuate (by association, never explicitly) superiority over many of the non-SWPL groups that together form the coalition of the fringes. Abortion, same-sex marriage, corporal punishment, environmentalism, and the like find SWPLs on one side lined up against the wrong kind of white people and NAMs on the other.

This isn't the case when it comes to hunting. It's a rural, conservative, religious, white, working-class, male thing. Buckshot can be fired all day at hunters without risk of accidentally hitting a protected creature in the process.

The following table shows the percentages of various demographic groups who hunt. The list is meant to be illustrative rather than exhaustive. For contemporary relevance, all responses come from the most recent decade of the GSS:

Group

% who hunt

Rural, working-class, church-attending, conservative white men

54.6

Blacks and Hispanics

5.5

Big city liberal whites

4.1

Women

4.7

Homosexuals

7.5

Atheists and agnostics

13.0

Self-described members of the upper class

11.7

Self-described members of the lower class

8.2

Tangentially, this isn't commentary on the specific trophy hunting expedition in question, something that strikes me as cruel and pathetic. It's not difficult to kill an old lion lured away from a pride with a projectile propelled by 21st century technology. Knocking out 20 pull ups with a weight vest on is a much more physically difficult feat. Travelling around the world to poach an essentially defenseless creature is an act of vain conspicuous consumption, not a display of personal valor. It doesn't take skill, it just takes time and money to burn. It is quite different from hunting herbivores for the sake of eating.